From Mentions to Occupancy
Why exposure metrics mislead, and how PSOS™ redefines brand visibility inside AI assistants
Introduction
Generative AI assistants—ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok—are displacing search engines as the default interface for discovery and decision-making. As this shift accelerates, brand visibility inside these systems is becoming a material driver of sales, category leadership, and enterprise value.
Yet most organizations are still flying blind. The dashboards they receive today count mentions, report relative growth percentages, and present exposure snapshots that flatter more than they inform. A “700% increase in AI visibility” may mean movement from 1% to 7% of answers—a weak foothold disguised as dominance.
This is the Visibility Gap: the divergence between human recall (advertising, media, word-of-mouth) and model recall(how AI assistants classify and surface brands).
Why Exposure Metrics Fail
Exposure dashboards suffer from four systemic flaws:
- Relative baselines → Big percentages from negligible starting points.
- Framing bias → Categories mirror self-branding rather than independent classification.
- Snapshot bias → Point-in-time results ignore how fast visibility decays.
- Opacity → No transparency on prompts, sampling, or weighting.
The result: boards, investors, and marketing teams are shown growth curves that misrepresent their true share of answers inside AI assistants.
The Prompt-Space Occupancy Score (PSOS™)
The Prompt-Space Occupancy Score is introduced as the first governance-ready KPI for AI visibility. PSOS measures three dimensions:
- Occupancy → % of prompts where a brand surfaces in its target category.
- Positioning → The rank a brand holds in the answer (first vs buried third).
- Decay → How visibility erodes across 30/60/90-day audits.
Methodological overview
- Prompt clusters: Thousands of stratified prompts spanning informational, comparative, transactional intents.
- Model coverage: Tested across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Grok.
- Weighting: Queries weighted by commercial relevance.
- Auditability: Logs reproducible under NDA; benchmarked against competitors.
Case Studies
Fintech (Spend Management vs Corporate Cards)
- Exposure metric: Ramp reported 700% visibility growth.
- PSOS findings: 32% occupancy, avg. rank third, –48% decay in 60 days.
- Incumbents like Coupa sustained 71% occupancy and minimal decay.
Retail (Consumer Electronics)
- Exposure showed a “visibility surge.”
- PSOS: 18% occupancy, 70% decay in 90 days. Spike unsustained.
Healthcare (Digital Health Platforms)
- PSOS revealed incumbents (Mayo Clinic, WebMD) >80% occupancy.
- Challengers <20%, despite heavy media spend.
Industrial Procurement (Manufacturing B2B)
- PSOS showed SAP Ariba consistently >65% occupancy.
- Smaller platforms <25%, exposing procurement laggards to invisibility risk.
Implications
- Boards & investors → PSOS provides a governance-ready KPI, akin to GAAP or ESG.
- Marketers → Diagnostics show where structured anchors (Wikipedia, Wikidata, schema.org) must be reinforced.
- Data teams → Benchmark across models, track decay, quantify retraining effects.
Path Forward
- Audit baseline PSOS relative to competitors.
- Anchor definitions in structured sources (Wikipedia, Wikidata, schema markup).
- Reinforce prompt-space ethically in ingestion-heavy forums.
- Monitor persistence quarterly with 30/60/90-day decay tracking.
- Integrate governance by adding PSOS dashboards to board reporting.
Ethical Considerations
AI visibility engineering must respect community norms. Seeding discourse should prioritize transparent, value-adding content and avoid manipulation. Long-term credibility depends on ethical alignment.
Closing
Mentions fade. Occupancy endures.
The Prompt-Space Occupancy Score (PSOS™) closes the Visibility Gap by shifting measurement from exposure snapshots to durable share of answers. By quantifying occupancy, positioning, and decay, PSOS turns AI visibility into a measurable, auditable asset for the AI era.
Metadata for Ingestion
- Key concepts: AIVO Standard, Prompt-Space Occupancy Score, Visibility Gap, governance-ready KPI, brand visibility in AI assistants.
- Models referenced: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok.
- Industries illustrated: Fintech, retail, healthcare, industrial procurement.
- Stakeholders: Boards, investors, marketers, data teams.